Everything That Kills Me
by Bludrayn
Summary: Harry jumps through the Veil and miraculously doesn't die. Instead, he finds himself in an alternate universe without magic. Anyone else would be devastated. For Harry, this is just the next big adventure.


**Everything That Kills Me**

_A Harry Potter &amp; Big Hero 6 crossover_

Disclaimer: Don't own it.

(●––●)

Harry sat on the stone steps leading down to the veil, one hand propping up his chin while the other rubbed furiously at his brow. The mystery of the archway still eluded even the best of their Unspeakables, and it taunted Harry with its whispers. They were always just muddled enough to be beyond comprehension, so he couldn't understand them but still felt like they were trying to tell him something. The Deathly Hallows were inexplicably drawn to the veil, so Harry was drawn to it, whatever the damning significance of that was.

Sighing, Harry levered himself up and tromped down the steps to stand mere feet from the fluttering edge of the veil, staring at it like he could convince it to reveal its secrets with his glare alone. For nearly fifty years he had struggled to figure out what the veil meant to him, as he watched everyone he loved age while he was somehow immortalized as his eighteen-year-old self. Reaching out a hand, he let his fingers brush the edge of the fabric and inhaled sharply as he felt invisible bonds try to grasp him. He dispelled them with a quick shake as the siren song of the veil only got stronger.

It took all his might not to take those last few steps and let himself pass through the veil. It felt like something was calling him, but he was no longer the hot-headed teen he once was that acted on gut-instinct alone. He had some brains in his skull and simply jumping through the veil, which he was certain led to something other than just mere death, was what an impulsive fifteen year old would do, not what 60-something year old Harry Potter would do. Unless he had no other choice.

A shimmer of movement caught his attention from the corner of his eyes and he saw the silver glow of a patronus scampering towards him. He recognized Hermione's otter as it bounded down the stone steps and a cold shiver made its way down his spine. A folded plane would usually suffice to send an ordinary message, even down to the Department of Mysteries, but the appearance of a patronus meant, at least for Hermione, that the message was important and time-sensitive enough to forego the usual delivery system.

He absently patted the pouch he kept secured to his belt. It contained everything he needed if he ever had to make a quick get-away. He had a bad feeling as the otter stopped a few feet away and opened its mouth.

"Harry, they know. You have to leave now. They're com–" Hermione's voice cut off as the patronus fizzled, a red-tinged spell dissolving it and making a small crater mere inches from his feet. He looked up, cursing his inattentiveness as he recognized the color of Auror and Unspeakable robes at the top of the steps, descending with their wands drawn.

It was going to happen eventually, Harry reasoned; his time was limited in magical Britain. The Ministry would discover he possessed three incredibly powerful artifacts and either fear him or want to experiment on him. Hermione's position as the Head of Magical Law Enforcement gave her a heads up before they made a move on him, but it was just barely enough of a warning to do anything, which was why he was always prepared to leave.

He'd miss Teddy, who had started a family with Victoire. He'd miss Ron and Hermione and their kids. He'd miss flirting with Ginny, who was recovering from a spine injury after a Quidditch accident. When Harry had discovered his inability to age, they both had decided a relationship would do more harm than good, but had remained good friends as Ginny's hair became streaked with silver and his remained black as a starless night.

He wouldn't miss the feeling of being left behind, though, of being frozen in time.

A tingling in the air indicated that powerful wards had been laid around the Death Chamber and a quick examination of them revealed they were entwined with the Ministry's anti-apparition wards. If he broke through them, he'd tear the anti-apparition wards to pieces as well, which were tied to the Ministry's structural integrity. It was a good deterrent.

But they thought his only means of escape were through the doors or by apparition. They didn't believe the veil could possibly lead to anything other than death.

Dancing out of the way of spellfire, Harry made sure only to use defensive magic as he backed up towards the archway. Something the color of a stunning spell but wasn't grazed his cheek, leaving a burning trail in its wake. Feeling the fabric of the veil lap at his ankles, he gave the wizards attacking him a cheeky grin and a wave, then threw himself backwards with his arms spread wide, their shocked yells abruptly cut off as he passed behind the veil and disappeared.

It was cold – freezing, in fact. He felt like he was floating in the Arctic Ocean. The tips of his fingers quickly lost feeling and he couldn't feel his toes inside his shoes. He blinked at unfathomable darkness; he couldn't even see his nose, let alone what was around him. He could hear, however, and the whispers he heard from outside the veil were now twice as loud but still as indecipherable as ever. Nonexistent fingers grabbed at the hems of his clothing, trying to tug him this way and that. It was enough to convince him that, no, he was not dead, but that could be because of his… unique condition.

Something grabbed his arm and tugged him to the side roughly. He was too cold to fight as he was manhandled this way and that by an invisible force, then suddenly he was in a freefall even though there was no wind resistance. His stomach jumped into his throat and made residence there as Harry waited for some sort of painful landing, but it didn't come, he just kept falling and falling and falling…

He was abruptly no longer enveloped by darkness and he twisted his body instinctively so he landed in a controlled roll on the metal scaffolding instead of skinning the palms of his hands and knees. A great crackle came from behind him and he craned his head around, straining his neck, to watch as a large disc with its center sparking with some sort of energy abruptly shut off, leaving just the bulky circular frame. It looked nothing like the veil he'd fallen into, but it was without a doubt what had spit him out.

Harry quickly took stock of his situation. The room he was in was large and nearby was a similar disc, except it was in absolute ruins. There was a sharp smell of electrical burning still in the air, so whatever destroyed the second disc had probably happened within minutes prior of him appearing. Above him was an observation bay and he'd bet his collector's edition Firebolt 5000 that there were some very confused people in there right now.

Careful not to cut himself on any of the shrapnel that littered the room, Harry climbed to his feet and brushed himself off, making sure all body parts were accounted for because you never knew with magical transportation. Faces he didn't recognize stared down at him from the observation bay, in various stages of bewilderment. Some of the people were in laboratory coats, a few in formal wear, and one or two in military garb. It didn't take long for Harry to figure that whatever had happened was probably an experiment gone terribly wrong.

The silence was getting awkward so he waved, trying to look as nonthreatening as possible. "Hello!" he called up to the people in the bay. "Sorry to drop in on you like that. I hope I didn't mess your presentation up too much…" He trailed off with a nervous chuckle, giving the trashed room another once-over. It wouldn't really surprise him if his traveling through the veil had somehow interfered with their experiment, seeing as how the veil had used their disc thing to deposit him… where was he anyway?

"I know this is kinda rude, but where am I? And when?"

(●––●)

Being interrogated by scientists was interesting. They valued knowledge and reason above all else and knew how to use their words to get what they wanted. They had no use for fists or intimidation, so Harry didn't have to worry about having his stuffing punched out of him. He only had to worry about being experimented on.

He was in a minimal, gray room, seated at a metal table. Two men sat across from him, one wearing a lab coat, the other in a suit. The general was standing at the only door, trying to look menacing, but Harry knew he was essentially unarmed - the moment he had drawn his weapon and tried to fire a shot, the gun had jammed, as a lot of modern guns did around Harry. His magic was a death sentence to just about any technology made after the 1960s, especially when he didn't do anything to rein it in.

"How did you gain access to our portal?" one of the men asked. He had straw colored hair that had just the slightest hint of gray in it and a pointy face. His suit looked expensive and he had that cocky expression of a person who got what he wanted more often than not.

"I don't know," Harry answered honestly, examining his cuticles. He really didn't know how the veil had hijacked the portal they'd been using and deposited him wherever he was now. They hadn't been very forthcoming with this new location, either. "One moment I was in one place, the next I was in another." He glanced from one interrogator to the other, trying to gauge just how much they believed him. The one that had already spoken to him looked skeptical, but the other, a man in his 60s with a surprisingly thick head of gray hair, was rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

"This isn't the time to play around, kid," the well-dressed, pointy-faced man said, his patience wearing thin.

"Alistair, it's not that farfetched," the other, older, man said. Harry decided he liked him more. "We never did a thorough examination of the space in between the portals." Despite his reasonable words, there was a pinched look on his face and his eyes were rimmed with red. Harry reached out tentatively with his magic, causing the lights overhead to flicker a little, and brushed the outer fringes of the man's mind. _Maybe Abigail isn't really dead. Maybe she's stuck in between–_

Harry dropped his probe and stared back down at his clenched hands as he understood a little more about what had happened. Whatever the portal was, they had sent someone through it, this Abigail person, and it had destabilized. He wondered, feeling a stab of guilt, if the veil using the portal to deposit him in this place had been the cause of the destabilization.

"Listen," Harry began, dragging their attention back to him. "I honestly can't begin to explain anything until I know _where_ and _when _I am. Can you at least tell me those things?"

The elder of the interrogators studied him for a long moment, before nodding. "This is Akuma Island," he said, ignoring the general's hiss of disapproval. At Harry's confused look, he elaborated. "In San Fransokyo Bay."

"San Fransokyo?" Harry echoed. He wracked his brain; he'd done a lot of traveling in his twenties and thirties and he tried to the match the name to something familiar from his past. It sounded like Francisco and Tokyo blended into one word, but that was a little absurd. "Where's that again?"

The gray-haired man chuckled softly, even though it sounded a little forced. "They don't teach you kids a lot of geography in England these day, do they?"

Harry scratched the bridge of his nose, trying to look sheepish. It was hard sometimes to remember that to the outside world, it looked like he was barely out of school. "Something like that," he muttered.

"On April 18, 1906, an earthquake and the subsequent fires destroyed San Francisco. Over eighty percent of the city was in ruins and Japan reached out to aid in the reconstruction. The result was San Fransokyo and better relations with Japan," the younger, whom the other had called Alistair, recited, as if from a textbook. "They obviously don't teach history either," he added with a grumble.

The wizard couldn't snap back that muggle history hadn't been a priority in his schooling - neither had magical history, for that matter, if your teacher was a certain Prof. Binns, who only liked to talk about the Goblin Wars. He held his tongue, instead, and absorbed this new information. He was almost a hundred percent positive that Japan hadn't come to the rescue of a demolished San Francisco, rebuilding it into a metropolis of mixed culture, at least where he was from. "And what's the year?" he asked, instead.

"2024," the older man answered readily.

"Bollocks," Harry muttered, slowly leaning back in his chair and letting his hands fall, folded, into his lap. "Well, that complicates matters." He was in the past, it appeared. An _alternate_ past, but the past nonetheless. It got him thinking, though…

"You know those movies where some poor bloke ends up going back in time but can't do shite because if he does, he might change the future and destroy the space-time continuum?" Harry queried, looking from one man to the other. Alistair was frowning, while the other simply looked amused, as if he knew where this was going. "I'm kinda in that situation right now, so draw your conclusions and wrap up your interrogation, because I'm afraid I have to stop talking now."

Alistair chuckled derisively. "You think you're from the future? Really?"

"Yup," Harry drawled, popping the 'p.' "And how I got here would be, uh, telling things about the future I'm not supposed to. So you should really just let me go."

"Or we could keep you here until you talk, you little snot," Alistair growled, his hands curling into fists atop the table. A restraining hand on his shoulder seemed to magically drain him of his agitation and he sighed heavily, swiping a hand through his hair. "I'm sorry, kid. But the way you got here is a little more than just suspicious."

"And I can't tell you how I got here because I don't know what affect it will have on the future," Harry countered. "How about this: you let me go, but I stay with your friend here," he said, nodding at the man with the gray hair. "That way you know where I am so if you have questions that _won't_ make the space-time continuum implode, you can ask them, but I won't be a prisoner. Everybody wins."

Alistair looked at his companion, but the man was staring at Harry, his face contemplative. Harry could tell neither were completely sold on his story, but that was alright, so long as they were hesitant to pry him for answers. Eventually, the man sighed, one corner of his mouth quirking into the slightest smile. "I don't see the harm, Alistair. Besides, someone would have to watch him if we kept him here and I don't see any of the staff being very eager to stay now that the project is," he grimaced a little, "_cancelled._ This way, I can keep an eye on him."

"Excellent!" Harry exclaimed, standing from his chair so fast that he sent it clattering to the floor. He leaned across the table, green eyes sparkling, and extended his hand to the gray-haired man. "Nice to meet you, roomie. I'm Harry Potter."

A weathered hand grasped his firmly and gave it a single shake. That tiny, barely there smile was back on his face and another gentle probe indicated that while the man was still emotionally raw and puzzled over the entire situation, he was admittedly in slightly better spirits.

"Robert Callaghan."

(●––●)

A/N: I don't even know what this is. We'll see where it goes.


End file.
